After a quarter century, America still struggles to let go of Vietnam

WASHINGTON {AP} The Vietnam War grows more distant from the American memory with each passing Memorial Day, yet every so often, something comes along to shake up the dust again.

The revelation that former Sen. Bob Kerrey's Navy SEAL unit killed more than a dozen villagers in the war is one of these unsettling things.

Many war veterans have defended Kerrey, often with ambivalence.

Yes, let's move on, some say. But even they cannot move on completely.

"I have no problem with what Senator Kerrey did. Senator Kerrey did his job," Mike Smith, a Marine veteran of the war, said just after his brother's name was added to the black granite Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall. "We've done enough grieving. Let it go."

As he spoke, his voice cracked with emotion. "I have no shame about what I did," he said, without elaborating.

Three decades have passed. Smith, of Commerce, Texas, is still trying to put it all behind him.

"We live with what we've done," he said. "Every once in a while in a quiet moment I think back to some of the things I did when I was over there."

David Tatum was a Marine during the war and now teaches American history in suburban Philadelphia. He says there is no reason for Kerrey, or any American, to dwell on events of the war. Like Smith, though, Tatum is not entirely ready to let the war slip into the past.

"We made a lot of mistakes, we know that," Tatum said while visiting the wall with his class from Upper Darby High School. "We went to Vietnam with all the right reasons and we did all the wrong things."

But then he adds: "We have been more than open about the mistakes we made. They (the North Vietnamese) terrorized. They butchered the people of South Vietnam, and that is something that the American people need to know."

To many Americans, Vietnam remains a wound that has not healed completely.

In January, Kent State University dropped plans to buy M-16 rifles for its police force because it reminded students of the day in 1970 when National Guardsmen fired on anti-war protesters on the Ohio campus, killing four and wounding nine.

Last year, Bill Clinton became the first U.S. president to visit Ho Chi Minh City since the war. There, he declared, "The years of animosity are past."

Just a few months before, however, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., journeyed to Vietnam, where he had been imprisoned during the war for 5 1/2 years, and accused communists of torturing POWs back then.

The "wrong guys" won, he said.

In 1995, Americans on both sides resumed debate after former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara wrote in his memoir that the policies he advocated in Vietnam were terribly misguided.

"The reaction to the Kerrey story has reinforced that there are still very sharp divisions within the country," said George Herring, who teaches foreign relations at the University of Kentucky. "Things aren't as raw as they were in the immediate aftermath of the war, but the divisions are still there."

Michael Kazin, history professor at Georgetown University, thinks people are focusing too much on the morality of the mission Kerrey led and not enough on the morality of the war itself.